Tagged: Trump Ocean Club

Put simply, it’s is the most revealing look we’ve had into how Russians were recruited for Trump’s towers.

Part of the business strategy at Trump Ocean Club was luring wealthy and “secretive” Russians — who didn’t want any questions asked about where their money came from.

The money quote in this story for me comes from a broker involved with the project named Alexandre Henrique Ventura Nogueira. Half of Nogueria’s customers were Russian.

“I had some customers with some, you know, questionable backgrounds.” He also said that he found out later that some customers were part of the Russian Mafia.

Another real estate broker who worked in Panama during the TOC pre-construction sales period told Global Witness that Eastern European and Russian investors at the TOC were “very secretive”, especially when setting up shell corporations, so you “don’t know their names” and “didn’t know where their money came from.”

Rich Russians – whom he called “the whales” – were prized clients because brokers could earn substantial commissions working with them. These were exactly the kind of purchasers needed by Trump and others to secure early sales, and therefore the financing through Bear Stearns to develop the project.

Ventura Nogueira was asked point blank about this: “Did the Trump Organization know there were some Russians there with strange backgrounds involved in buying? I don’t know.”

There are a lot of things to like about this story. (Story is the wrong word. It’s a 28-page report.) Not only does it reveal the corruption that built the Trump Ocean Club, but it goes a step further. Ken’s story offers solutions — a rarity in journalism — to eliminate the pervasive money laundering in real estate that built not only Trump’s tower in Panama, but his tower Manhattan’s Soho neighborhood, Azerbaijan, and other places.

The story calls the Trump Ocean Club one of Trump’s most lucrative deals. How lucrative? We don’t know.

But what was in it for Trump? There is little transparency around Trump’s financial agreement with Newland, a company that filed for bankruptcy in 2013. In fact, according to Univision News’ reporting of a New York court’s hearing on the bankruptcy, Newland refused to turn over the agreement with Trump to license his name. This prompted the judge to say to Newland’s attorney: “Go to Panama. If you want to do your deals in secret, go and do it in Panama. Don’t do it in my court.”